Germany added to list of World War II victims

Here is an interesting bit from the Associated Press, published yesterday:

Chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated her support Saturday for a memorial to Germans forced to relocate from Eastern Europe after World War ii, but said it did not mean Germany was seeking to diminish responsibility for starting the war.After the Third Reich collapsed in 1945 and borders were moved westward, millions of ethnic Germans in Poland, then-Czechoslovakia and elsewhere were viewed as traitors and were expelled or fled.Backed by the German government, a group called the Federation of Expellees is moving ahead with plans for a memorial in Berlin for those dispossessed, which will also include information on expulsions of other people throughout history.Merkel told the group at its annual meeting that the planned Center against Expulsions was an appropriate way to commemorate the expellees’ plight.”The history of flight and expulsions affects us all,” she told several hundred members of the federation. “It is a part of our national identity and part of our shared cultural memory.”She sought to allay fears from Poland and elsewhere that such a memorial might be rewriting history, saying that part of paying tribute to the expellees was remembering what caused their situation.”We will not forget: This was a direct consequence of the German war and the Nazi tyranny,” she said. “Yes, we admit out responsibility for the darkest chapter in Germany’s history—there is no reinterpretation of history.”

Merkel’s comments that the memorial doesn’t diminish German culpability in starting World War ii notwithstanding, this story supports the analysis we wrote about this subject in 2006:

This trend has been gathering steam in Germany for several years.Consider the attitude displayed in the words of then-German Federal President Johannes Rau in a speech before the Association of German Expellees in September 2003: “The suffering of each and every one [alluding to Germans] comes before all judgments, before any considerations of right and wrong, cause and effect.” In his speech, as commentator Rodney Atkinson wrote, Rau sought to “ameliorate German atrocities in Europe by equating them with the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after the war. Rau even partly blames the Allies for Hitler’s crimes ….” Rau’s speech actually reflects a philosophy that has been emerging in recent years in Germany that one may label victimhood.In 2002, a fast-selling book that depicted Germans as war victims hit German bookshelves. Der Brand, or The Fire, detailed Allied bombing of German cities during World War ii. In 2003, Die Welt reported the creation of a “Prussian Claims Society” in Germany whose purpose is to process legal suits for individual German property claims in territory belonging to Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia. At that time the Society was distributing claim forms for Germans to claim their property in “East Germany” (i.e. Poland, etc.). A Polish official spoke of “worrying signals” as Germany was increasingly being presented as a “victim” of World War ii. Then in 2004, the German foreign minister tried to depict Germany as the victim of British memories of its militarism, while the biggest national German newspaper suggested Queen Elizabeth of Britain should apologize for British war-time bombing.

The crux of this trend is that victimhood in Germany is feeding an awakening of German national pride. Historically, this has had global repercussions—and prophecy tells us that it will again.